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How I learned to stop fearing climate change and learned to love apocalypse

Well, sort of.

I'm despairing of intelligence in social discourse, press, government, industry, religion, or almost anywhere else. Present company excluded, of course.

So we'll have climate change, everything big or delicate or refined or nonadaptive or beautiful will die off. So nothing's forever. What's special about people? Or trees? Or dodo birds? Or panda bears?

Other eras ended with toxic volcano fumes, or asteroids, or diseasea, or whatever. There are mass extinctions, cool critters become fossils, the little disgusting things like rodents and cockroaches re-evolve into the new dominant species.

What's next - who knows. I think humanity is sowing the seeds of its own destruction and honestly doesnt care.

To be honest, I love nature and the big trees and the cool animals and plants. I find it appalling that people are so narcissistic and/or stupid and/or greedy that they take an "Après moi le déluge" attitude and basically tell future generations, "Après moi, fuck you." Meanwhile, paradoxically thinking that their fecundity leads to pseudoimmortality because a few strands of their DNA might replicate for a few more generations. Don't get me wrong - I would love the idea that a tree that I plant lives 100, 200 years and absorbs CO₂ into its woody rings and gives shade to a future generation. I really grieve over the wanton destruction.

But I feel pretty sure, the self-centered assholes will win. Does it matter? Or should we give in to the hedonists and let the future worry about itself?

Tags: climate change, hedonism, narcissism

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Brian on March 18, 2010 at 2:59pm

I think they're winning right now, but it doesn't mean they have to win in the end. Human's are selfish by nature, it's the way we are, and we have to appeal to their selfish side. Maybe get business to start making money with renewable fuel sources, appeal to the "your genes will die" thing. Get the democrats to stop being such pussies and pass anti global warming bills in the face of opposition, get rich people to pay them more then oil lobbyists.

Unfortunately we have to play them, the people at the top got there by being ruthless and selfish and that's the mentality we need dealing with them and we have to be the same.

Permalink Reply by Howard S. Dunn on March 18, 2010 at 3:36pm

450 million years of evolution to make a funny, reasonably intelligent Bill S - supporter of killer tunes and the scientific method - and he selfishly pisses it away by not reproducing just to make room for baby-factory Catholic girls to pop out little altar boys. Thanks a million you selfish bastard!

I sincerely hope your starving cats eat your irresponsible eyes out of your rotting skull holes.

;^P

Permalink Reply by Jason Spicer on March 18, 2010 at 6:29pm

Two things, Howard:

1. Have you seen Catholic girls in their school uniforms? Or is that only in porn? Perhaps I've said too much.
2. I fail to see how it's irresponsible to provide a tasty buffet of eyeballs for the cats.

Permalink Reply by Howard S. Dunn on March 19, 2010 at 1:16pm

at the CYO where their learning to blow.

Permalink Reply by Howard S. Dunn on March 19, 2010 at 1:16pm

1. I have done Catholic girls in their uniforms - when I was their age, of course. (I'm not a prie ... I mean pedophile.)

2. Yes, providing a tasty final buffet of eyeballs for his cats would be a reasonable recompense for sarcastically claiming to not give a shit!

Permalink Reply by Prog Rock Girl on March 18, 2010 at 7:47pm

If a cat wants to eat me when I'm dead, I'm good with that. I'd like my body to go toward nutrition for some endangered carnivore that is running out of food, actually!

Permalink Reply by JayBarti on March 18, 2010 at 4:02pm

Plus it beats dying alone in an apartment with your starving cats eating your eyes. ;p

That how I plan on leaving this life, feeding my kitties one last time.

Permalink Reply by Sentient Biped on March 18, 2010 at 9:20pm

This is what I'm telling people to do with my corpse. They also leave pets out for raptors, but not people. My cat is too picky, but buzzards would delight in my eyeballs.

Permalink Reply by Jim DePaulo on March 19, 2010 at 1:12pm

Plus it beats dying alone in an apartment with your starving cats eating your eyes. ;p

That's exactly how my hermit next door neighbor left this moral coil.

Permalink Reply by Howard S. Dunn on March 18, 2010 at 3:50pm

I worked for three years during the Reagan Nuclear Arms race - door to door and on the phone - to help organize 27,000 citizens in the Seattle area to lobby Congress to shut down and clean up the plutonium factory in Hanford, WA.

I got called a 'stinking commie' more times than I could count. One member, a former nuclear bomb squad technician (yeah - 'red wire or blue wire' is for pussies) told me about a 'broken arrow' (accidentally dropped nuke) that fell on Idaho. Three out of four failsafe systems failed. He gave us $350 when he signed up and became a highly active member.

The Hanford nuclear reservation had supplied jobs for three generations of families and they hated us. We kept telling them they would have jobs for seven generations cleaning it up. Meanwhile, drums of plutonium waste, buried under ground, were filling up with one of the byproducts of decay - hydrogen. Yeah, boom - plutonium volcano!

Well, the plant was shut down before that happened. Also, it is one of the best funded clean-up sites in the world - so the economy didn't suffer even a hiccup. And I honestly believe I made a difference.

So you can list your cataclysms if you like. But 70,000 years ago we were reduced to a global population of 2,000. I have to tell you - I'm sure glad those people didn't just roll over and die.

Permalink Reply by Howard S. Dunn on March 19, 2010 at 1:19pm

Lol - you know I kid Bill. It is difficult to have to even worry about this shit since its so frikkin idiotic in the first place.

Frankly, I want a world that runs on renewable energy because its smart and sublimely AWESOME - not because New York is about to turn into a massive version of Venice.

Permalink Reply by Sentient Biped on March 19, 2010 at 12:25pm

I agree with doing good, reducing profligate waste of resources and spewing greenhouse gasses into the air, driving less and more efficient vehicles, and making other personal changes.

But I also look at the fact that I'm one guy out of 6,692,030,277 people, most of whom don't have the skills, ability, incentive, or desire to create a heritage for those who follow.

Again, I don't discount any effort to make or keep the world a better place. Those are honorable avocations and I also emulate them. But by accepting the apocalypse, maybe I'll judge others less, and worry less about whether my efforts are a drop in the bucket, a fly attempting to stop a train.